


Confeitor

by deepandlovelydark



Category: Il buono il brutto il cattivo | The Good The Bad and The Ugly (1966)
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Cabin Fic, Gay, Mountains, Period Typical Attitudes, Time Shenanigans, Western, weird west
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-10-23 05:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17677274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: There's a legend about the Levant that Blondie had heard, once. After five days of sandstorm, a man might kill his nearest and dearest without reproof, for every slightest action would be taken in hot blood.And after five days of blizzard, close confinement in a small cabin, anybody might forgive a man for murdering Tuco Ramirez; but that never happened.(It never happened.)(He wonders if it might have happened.)





	1. this is an ending

**Author's Note:**

> The sequel to "Animal Magnetism", and I'll make it a series as soon as I think up a satisfactory title. 
> 
> Or prequel, depending on how you look at things...

Everyone knows the stories about the haunted men, so common in the West's decline: the kind who'll drink the dregs until dawn, throw away their money on every kind of vice imaginable, to ward off their approaching ghosts with frantic busy fervour. Sometimes they are saved, sometimes they are not. He never craved that particular form of damnation, Blondie knows, and perhaps that's why matters are different for him. 

(Never, not once, has he heard tell of a man who ceased being haunted, only to find the exorcism a wound rather than a healing. These maps are blank, and lacking referents.)

The ride from Sonora might be pitifully easy now, with its marked trails and easy watering; but as the route has softened, so has he. It takes longer now to rise in the morning, care for his mount, build the nightly fire. Crossing the border is a slow journey, one affording him plenty of time to reconsider. 

His partner would be dissuaded, so easily solaced by life. He wants something else. 

If he knew what it was, maybe he wouldn't have to make the pilgrimage.

**********

"Why do you do this to yourself, eh? What makes you need it?"

Cheyenne, 1877, after one of their more fraught performances. They'd badly misread the room, given the audience too much humour and not enough gore. Until a stage hand had confused the ropes and Tuco had come nearer choking on a stage prop than he ever had upon the scaffold; Blondie had left a bullet souvenir in the theatre wall, in a motion so instinctive it'd startled even him. 

The manager had taken them off stage, offering brandy and apologies; Tuco had shoved his fist into the man's gold-capped teeth and walked straight back out, to finish what they'd started. A satisfied audience, that one. 

"I don't think that's what you're asking," Blondie had said. "You mean, why do we need it?"

"I say what I say, Blondie. I know what I get out of this, but I don't see what you do. You don't care whether they throw roses or tomatoes, you forget about the money," Tuco says hoarsely, waggling a finger. 

"Once." A man with livid rope marks across his Adam's apple might reasonably expect indulgence for the night, and of course his partner will milk it for all he can. "Only once."

Once, indeed. That gunfight, that one moment when the ordinary stuff of their lives had been caught in unearthly light, sackcloth turned to silk, their uncompromising trinity. Better to ask why he needs the grey moments between reenactments, the unimportant pettiness and squabbles of life; and to that he'd say he wouldn't, if there was ever any choice. Tuco has appetites, knows gluttony in full, but his partner will never understand lust. 

(Not religion, when it lacks worship; not performance, since he's never acting. Not anything that will allow itself to be caught in word or thought. Naught: but it lets itself be invoked in ritual, and that's a curse that he'd call blessing.)

Tuco is saying something now, but he's not listening any longer. 

**********

He wakes late, fords the river with an old man's caution; so Blondie reaches the cemetery around twilight. Too warm for a fire, but he builds it nevertheless. 

Nothing is going to happen. At heart he doesn't believe in this, any of this, the miracle that sustained him for a quarter-century no more than so much dreaming. Angel Eyes is gone, irrevocably. He's free. 

"Suppose I don't want to be free," Blondie says, taking up his poncho and a long stick. What he has in mind is more tricky than he'd envisioned, and the fire's nearly smothered before it's done; but a little kerosene sets the flames burning better, and he watches the green threads fade to distant ash. 

(There is no way this will work.)

(It works.)


	2. thirty-odd years ago, soon after a graveyard

He’s young again.

He’s young, wrapped in the comfort of self-possessed flesh, the memory of which had so long since deserted him. It’s one thing to know he used to be this strong, able to ride for a night and a day and needing to scrape his beard after each, to keep that length of harsh stubble that suits him so.

It’s another altogether to be it. To find himself vying against Tuco’s hard strength, pinned brutally against the mattress. Blondie chuckles, shoves his way upwards; they struggle their way into a more even position, both satisfied and sweating.

“You’re quiet,” his partner says. “What’s the matter, cat got your tongue? Or maybe it froze when you went outside, in this weather that’d figure. Damn this Widowmaker, anyway. Why we ever took such a bad short-cut I’ll never know…”

he’s young, but he remembers. 

Five days snowed into this cabin, deep midwinter. They’d still been a trifle reckless then, intoxicated by the new-found wealth and fearless against the world- getting trapped like this, reckoning up their supplies and carefully not speaking of their misgivings, that’d sobered them up a mite. Tuco heading south to buy that ranch in Sonora, at long last; him going north, to see what new adventures might trouble him past the plains.

(Not enough. A few, but not enough, and none half so potent as what he’d already lived. Weak beer to a man who’d taken spirits- and that was when Angel Eyes had begun to haunt him.)

Tuco, still chattering away, headbutts him by way of getting his attention; Blondie holds to his accustomed silence. Lets his hands stray down to an overladen pocket. Black rosary beads that crackle at his touch, a weird pain that burns his flesh but doesn’t harm it. 

Tuco curses. He must have felt it too.

“Nice piece of work, eh Blondie? You should have one also.”

“I’m not Catholic,” Blondie says, slipping the beads out one by one. They lie awkwardly in his fingers, grotesquely large and ill-shaped. Tuco had been rather more particular about the thickness of the coating, than its looks.

“Well, you should be,” Tuco says, with characteristically zesty contempt. “Believing in nothing, like you do-”

“That’s not quite so. I believe there’s a divine power.”

“And that it’s just you alone to talk to it- that’s not healthy for a man. You talk to God, you get to thinking you’re God too, that’s what happens. Very corrupting.”

“A Protestant has never sold an indulgence. Or a mass.”

“Easy thing, not to sell what you don’t have. You lay out money for an indulgence that’s no good, well, I bet that’s taken into account, and anyway it’s on the priest. If you screw around talking to God, that’s on  _you_ \- and who needs that on their conscience, hey? No. Mary and every saint in heaven, I’ll ask them to pray for me,” Tuco says, chuckling to himself. “Men like us, Blondie, we need all the help we can get.”

“Uh-huh,” Blondie says absently, fondling the rosary. “I’ll give you this much, Tuco, it’s a clever way to carry gold. How much would you want for it?”

“It’s not for sale. Get your own.”

“Another one wouldn’t be like this,” Blondie says, letting his drawl stretch a little. Nice and fat and comfortable, the way Tuco likes to hear it. “Not yours, if you follow me…”

“Ohhh- it’s like that, eh?”

For all the indifferent words, there’s a quaver in them. A shift of surprise, uncertainty, maybe a little pleasure too…

“Could be,” Blondie says, and slips the beads over his head.

It’s such a simple, easy movement, so ordinary- hardly different from the twine windings they sometimes use to spice their games a little. An easy motion to take back. A moment, a single finger would do it.

It keeps him calm. When his partner turns white and starts to gasp, choking as though the air has turned to water- when the convulsions start and it takes all Blondie’s strength to hold the body down, so it won’t thrash itself to death against the cabin’s hard boards.

What keeps him calm, to see himself reflected in familiar brown eyes that lack anything of his partner. 

Blondie digs through a pocket, offers up a smoke. He knows that body well enough to be certain it’ll appreciate a good cigar. 

“A golden-haired angel,” the man says, coughing. “Watching over…”

“I’ll take it that’s me,” Blondie says; and lights his own in quiet contentment. 


	3. he would also like to know, whose perspective this is

You don’t quite remember, who it is you are.

“Angel Eyes,” Blondie is saying, with all his careless, believable flair to sell the name. But that’s not the story you read in his fingertips. The way he’s coaxing you warm and lively again, a knowledge of this body fonder than his words, that’s habit. Long familiarity, not the kind of lovemaking acquired in a single dust-choked night.

(Never mind how it feels to you. With one foot in the grave, any flesh would suit.)

“Right, yes-”

and you know that voice intimately (why shouldn’t you? almost the last sound you heard) and you don’t (lower-pitched, wasn’t it? and what about that Spanish twang?)

“God, it’s strange hearing that voice again- I guess I don’t know why I figured different. You couldn’t make it be less like him, could you?”

“Don’t be more of an ass than you can help, Blondie.”

The beginnings of a frown there, while your partner stares and wonders just what kind of bargain he’s letting himself in for. Your instincts scream to reassure him, ease the situation before this man starts asking questions you can’t answer. “ _Res nullius._ ”

“Oh,” Blondie says, as if that made everything clear. Given that it damn well doesn’t, you can only be grateful he’s bought the graft-

for a smart partner, sometimes Blondie’s such a mark is what-

“Nobody’s property.” Explaining it to him, and your- self (damn it, even that’s ambiguous). “That which exists in a state of nature, free and up for grabs- that doesn’t mean it lacks qualities. A homesteader builds on what land he finds.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. Settling down’s never been my style…even less now, I think.” He fingers the heavy beads around his neck. “It’s no small thing to have a second chance. And with the right partner this time.”

“I was going to ask that- why now?” That there had to be a moment he relieved, over and over again, that’s cornerstone for all the rest- but we are not in a cemetery circle. Thirty years and more, and his lowered eyes tell me no more than they ever did. “Bend the universe to a point, by all means- why this point?”

“It’s a good time to do this. We’ll be trapped here by the blizzard for another five days, it gives you time to get used to that-” he casts an amused glance. “Well, you know. Maybe you’ll want to shave the mustache.”

“But why-” and fucking  _Cristo,_  I can ask this wholeheartedly- “why not  _before_ our Sad Hill showdown?”

“Oh, that’s simple enough. I might not have been lucky enough to survive you a second time- and as you’ll remember with Tuco, I prefer stacking the odds in my favour. So we’re playing it exactly the same, only you’re alive and he’s dead. Just the way I want, now that I know better.”

More bitterness than I think he notices, swamped by the pathos of his stage melodrama. There isn’t one ounce of trust there. None at all.

And if there’s anything to force my hand now, against the frantic, blistering instinct of my  _fantasma,_ it’s this slow, creeping awareness. That to Blondie I’m either the man he wants to save, or the man he wants to kill- and I had damn well better not be the latter.

_You want that, Ramirez? You want him to realise the trick’s failed, that life’s less neat than he wants to think?_

No response: but a strain I’d failed to even notice, starts to ease. I’ve bought myself a truce.

For a little while, anyway.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [in the sympathetic flesh](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18722671) by [sybilius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sybilius/pseuds/sybilius)




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